We Watched a Rocket Leave the Atmosphere

We walked out to the end of the Jetty Pier, a crooked concrete pathway that followed the pile of boulders that broke the waves heading toward the Cape. A cool breeze blew up the coast and the sky was clear enough.

Eleven miles to the north was the launch site. A fan of light swung slowly back and forth just over the Cape’s dark line of trees, a serrated collar over the shore. To the east there were a few red sentinels on high scaffolds, blinking in slow syncopation.

A helicopter as big as a house flew over the pier and hovered, drowning out the sound of the drunks singing only half to the themselves, and the chatter of the night fishermen, with its noise and chop. The generals must have thought our position was a good one, to hover over us so close.

The “window” opens at 12:33, someone said. That was two minutes away.

At 12:33, we saw a glowing, diffuse ball of dust, shaped like an enormous egg, expand suddenly above the trees. After a couple seconds, or maybe longer (time began to dilate…), the light condensed to a single golden ball so bright that you told yourself it is like the sun, it will hurt your eyes, but you kept staring at it anyway as the sunball slowly rose in a steady upward line defying gravity and sense, as though it was attached to a hidden pulley. The whole time it was rising, it was drifting slightly east over the ocean.

In the next phase, the rocket that to us was a ball of sun started laying down a trail of white smoke in the dark sky, and soon after that we saw a long ribbon of flame jet out behind it, like the tongue of a dragon licking down, a curved and moving knife.

At first the trail of flame was gold, but soon it turned blue and orange and the rocket flew out, out over the water, its flame slowly shrinking in width, growing long and thin.

We watched the flame for a long time, until it was just another moving aircraft like all the planes over the ocean, until it was just a small star lost in the haze of the sky above the sea, and until, as it disappeared, it dropped a red-orange ball of fire, which was one of the booster rockets coming down. Then it was gone.

My hand felt the cool metal rail. Only at that moment did the people on the pier start to stir, look at one another, breath more deeply, talk about whatever they had been talking about before they stopped mid-sentence.

We had seen the rocket fly. A large vessel had left the planet and continued at speed beyond our vision, carrying a satellite the size of a school bus, while we stood there under a large white moon a few feet above the dark and silver sea, and the regular growl of the waves. We knew how it felt to stay on earth while others choose to escape the atmosphere, to live in thinner gravities.

Soon after that, the helicopter above us turned, nosed away and then sped back to its pad. Another airship that had been hovering far out at sea sliced fast through the air above us, returning with whatever message it bore to Kennedy Space Center, which that night hosted the largest concentration of admirals and generals outside the Pentagon.

Slowly, the people around me drifted back to the parking lot at the foot of the pier, started their cars, and drove toward the tolls and speedtraps on the highways of central Florida.

• Written at the SpaceX launch at Cape Canaveral in early March 2018.